SEO Tips from the Experts' Pen

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SEO Tips from the Experts' Pen

1.
The Best of
inbound.org AMAs:
SEO Edition

2.
We’re in the spirit of giving!
We’ve compiled a hefty handful of the best questions asked and answered from
our SEO AMAs as a gift to you!
We hope that you’ll enjoy this gift from the inbound.org team!

5.
Rand Fishkin
Founder of Moz
Words of Wisdom
"Best way to sell something: don't
sell anything. Earn the awareness,
respect and trust of those who
might buy.”
tweet this!

6.
Question
“For someone trying to succeed in digital marketing,
and more specifically SEO, what do you think is the
one quality they should possess?”
Crystal Ware
Dog Lover, Chocolate Feen, Southern Belle, Adrenaline Junkie, Half Marathoner,
Crohnie, Bookshelf Peruser, Head of SEO with @Location3 http://www.location3.com
click here to see
the original thread

7.
Answer:
“While I don't think I've always done my best with this quality,
something I've strived hard for is empathy. There's a reason it's
the most important value in TAGFEE - I think when people are
able to empathize with others, they can do their best work in
marketing, because they understand the problems their
audience faces, the ways their message might be received, and
how they can help before asking for anything in return.”

9.
Answer:
“I like C the best most of the time, and A sometimes. On
occasion, if the content was particularly time-sensitive and
historically interesting, I might do B. But yes, I really like
the idea of recycling content to help it earn more
attention.”

10.
Question
“Do you feel that Search Engine algorithms put too
much emphasis on domain authority and backlinks.
Makes it harder for new sites to rank, even if they have
quality. I think algo needs much improvement.”
Neil
Blogging tips for the newbie. SImple, easy and useful.

11.
Answer:
“I'd agree that it's hard for new sites to rank, but I'm not
sure that means the algos are broken. Human beings like
familiarity and things they trust, so when they see new
things, they're often skeptical at first. That's why engines
like to reward sites that have earned brand awareness,
attention, and trust, and why part of the SEO's work is to
build those things in order to earn rankings.”

12.
Question
"If you had visits and related data from around 300 websites then
what are the questions and answers you will try to find from the
data? Like:
1. Trend of device used by visitors.
2. Percentage of visits from each search engine."
Christy Kunjumon
Inbound Marketer @TechWyse, SEO, Blogger, LinkBuilder

13.
Answer:
“I'd love to see:
Relative share of social media sites
Relative share of all traffic sources (search vs. social vs. referring sites vs. direct)
Relative share of paid vs. organic sources
Relative share of home page vs. internal page visits
Relative time on site / pages per session
Relative rates of conversion to various actions (if there are shared actions
across many of the sites)”

14.
Question
“What do you think will be the best method for
obtaining backlinks moving forward?”
Mack Ayache
Engineer, Marketer, Designer

15.
Answer:
“I think "link earning" in general is going to be the best, long-
term method for growing that signal. By link earning, I mean
doing things that will make people and organizations want to
point to you/your work, and then making them aware of it. There
are lots of ways to earn links without content. I covered some
alternatives here (yikes! check out that horrible lack of facial
hair) and here (oh thank god, that's better).”

16.
Question
"What metrics would you or MOZ recommend to use
when reporting on content success?
How can i weight it?
Lastly, is it wise to show a client all of this data?"
Dan Hugo
Sydney-based #ContentMarketing strategist. Tweeter of
#SEO news. Author and scholar of humanities.

17.
Answer:
“We use something called "1Metric" to kinda-sorta measure all
these things together. Dr. Pete did a great presentation on it
here. It mashes up lots of all three of the types of things you
bucketed and then builds a correlation between those numbers
and overall performance in our funnel. I think Matt Brown and
Jay Leary from Moz are working on a way to actually turn that
into a product in the future :-)”

18.
Question
“What are the most important KPIs to point a client to when you are
helping them earn links and content opportunities for the purposes of
rankings, traffic, and brand awareness? In other words, when performing
top of the funnel targeted digital marketing for the purposes of (business
goals X, Y, and Z), how do you best prove your worth in the beginning of
the journey?”
Nicholas Chimonas
Director of Product Development at Page
One Power,Marketing and Advertising

19.
Answer:
“Metrics - check out this post: http://moz.com/blog/fixing-
the-broken-culture-of-seo-metrics-whiteboard-friday
That's pretty much how I like to break things down from a
metrics perspective, and I think it can scale from the very
small to the very big companies.”

20.
Question
“How do you see SEO evolving in the future?”
Mack Ayache
Engineer, Marketer, Designer

21.
Answer:
“I think the technical optimization elements of SEO will always be with us, and that the
engines will continue changing - creating new opportunities and shutting down old ones
(e.g. schema vs. authorship). But, I also think SEO will get more complex and become
more and more a part of all the other marketing and amplification investments
organizations make. Those who succeed will be the ones that can best leverage all the
marketing they do to work in concert with their SEO, and that means a lot of
coordination and people around companies listening to SEOs, which will be
uncomfortable. I suspect that will limit the success most can achieve, but it will also
create huge opportunity + reward for those who can do it.”

22.
Question
“Do you think that Linkless SEO has any merits? If so -
how far out do you think we are from that?”
William Harris
VP of #Marketing for @DollarHobbyz - I tweet about #GrowthHacking #Entrepreneur
#Startup #SaaS #SEO #ContentMarketing #SocialMedia #Ecommerce

23.
Answer:
“Yes(ish). I think you can do lots of good things to set
yourself up for success without pro-active link acquisition
and outreach. But I think it will be hard to compete with a
wholly link-unaware strategy unless your competition is
also mostly link-unaware. It feels like we're still years away
from a truly "don't even think about links" future.”

24.
Question
“Do you think gaining links through replacing broken
ones are worth an effort?”
Mert Gürel
Istanbul based line producer and production
manager for TV and film

25.
Answer:
“I've been really impressed with a lot of stuff Brian's published over the years.
The "Moving Man Method" post describes something I'd always heard of as
"broken link building" or the more awkward "broken link link building." I think
it's a perfectly legit tactic and one that can help make lots of sites better, not
just your own, which is great for the web. Here's another great post on the
topic from Russ Jones: http://moz.com/blog/the-broken-link-building-bible”

26.
Question
“Have you done any research, or have an opinion on, the benefits/advantages of creating
content using 1st person language in the titles vs. 3rd person?
Based on Hummingbird, mobile, and a whole host of devices that recognize voice commands, I
would imagine that search queries are starting to look a little more like “I want to know what
the best xyz is..”, “I'm looking for inbound marketing consulting help.”
So in turn, my question is, are there organic/SERP advantages to creating content with titles
that are written in the 1st person and might look like: “I'm Looking for Inbound Help: 5 Things
to Consider" or “I Want to Learn About SEO: Top 3 Resources to Review””
Aaron Mandelbaum
Founder & CEO SMB Advisors http://www.smbadvisors.com ; Inbound Sales, Marketing
& Branding strategies for Small & Mid Size Businesses @HubSpot Partner - Boston

28.
Question
“What do you see as being the biggest threat/challenge to the
SEO profession in the coming years, and do you feel it represents
greater opportunity for the cream to rise to the top, or danger
signs that the industry needs to take heed of?”
Ed Leake
Motorsport fan, real coffee drinker, loves long walks to the bank. I talk Digital
Marketing, SEO, PPC, SEM, Content & doughnuts | Managing Director - @Midas_UK

29.
Answer:
“Biggest threat/challenge to SEO - my guess is that the biggest threat is that a
closed network (like Facebook) enters the search market and wins significant
share. Google may have crept into some evil over the last decade, but they
are still, by and large, an open platform where competition is (even if biased)
at least possible. Facebook would be a different story, and given how FB's
treated other players in their ecosystem (brand reach, Zynga, etc), I think we'd
have serious cause for concern. It's a paradox, because I want more strong
competition with Google, but I fear it coming from a closed system of any
kind.”

30.
Question
“How do you think search will change in the next 5
years? - and do you think those changes will affect
people who focus on quality content over "the latest
trick".”
Gabriel Ferland
Website Design, Development and Marketing

31.
Answer:
“Search in 5 years! Bah! I can barely predict out one year due to how fast this
industry moves. That said, I think deep learning is going to be a big part of
how engines evolve and because of that, we're going to see much less "do X
to tweak signal Y and move rankings" and much more "how do all these
disparate things that earn me attention, trust, amplification, and engagement
seem to somehow affect my SEO?!" Even Googlers who work on search
quality and web spam won't be able to explain what's in the algorithm,
because the machine will be learning and growing on its own... Welcome to
the unsupervised future!”

33.
Answer:
“When I was coming up in the field, I spent a tremendous amount of time reading and participating in
forums and blog comments and writing blog posts of my own. I think some people learn through that
consumption and participation process, and that's cool. I do agree that you also want to get your feet
wet - I had clients whose website SEO I was working on at the time, so that helped me. I'd certainly
advise anyone starting out to also invest some energy in publishing a site - even just a hobby-
related-blog or passion project website - and working on its content, social media reach, links, and
UX. You'll learn a ton doing the hands-on work.
I don't, however, believe there's some ideal formula for balancing between the two. For some people
it's 80/20 one way, for others, it's 20/80 the other way - we all learn differently :-)”

37.
Question
“Is it wise to no index / no follow microsites which are
used primarily for paid campaigns? What if they are
getting some organic traffic that converts?”
Neil Moree
I like design, css, analytics, adwords, & french!

38.
Answer:
“Think about your content strategy (same content in different
places, only one place), think about fragmentation of your
presence on serps, think of confusion for customers, and other
such things. I would never make the decision based solely on
my search engine optimization strategy. I would think about
customer experience first, the overall business strategy second
and then implications on SEO.”

39.
Question
“Do you see semantics search replacing current search
in the next 3-5 years? And how may this impact SEO &
analytics?”
Monil
Co-Founder -Market Motive, Digital Marketing Evangelist

40.
Answer:
“Here's the wikipedia definition for semantic search: "Semantic search seeks to improve search accuracy by
understanding searcher intent and the contextual meaning of terms as they appear in the searchable dataspace,
whether on the Web or within a closed system, to generate more relevant results."
If you reflect on it for a few mins I'm sure you'll agree that with every passing day, with every little step that
Google/Bing/Baidu/Yandex take, search has been becoming semantic for the last couple of years at least. The
process might even be accelerating.
In terms of SEO, I think the very core of SEO (content creation, earning unbegged for links, having a social platform
with engaged audiences, et al) will remain important. There might be new nuances that crop up here or there, more
data we can share with the various webmaster tools, but we all adapt to them pretty easily.”

44.
Answer:
“As analysts we have what we get. We make the best of it.
I'm not sure the situation is so dire (even if it all goes zero)
that we can't improve our mobile experiences or our
mobile seo strategy.”

46.
Answer:
“1. If there is enough data (say over 18 months) you can take even the basic forecasting
tools in Excel and forecast the past purely based on past performance. A little
dangerous, but works fine as a baseline.
2. I spend a lot of time trying to understand where the company is investing money and
how much (initiatives and people) and then based on past performance I create
multipliers to apply to future performance. When we had x guys doing SEO we got from
xx,xxx to xxx,xxx in xx months, now we have x+ so we can expect blahblah more.
3. I focus a lot on the competitive landscape. Not only where the industry and trends are
going, but specifically how fast my competitors are individually growing, where their
increases are coming from etc.”

47.
Tom Critchlow
Digital & Art at Fiercely Curious
Words of Wisdom
“Forget about LINK BUILDING
and all that buzzword bingo -
just identify 5 really important
people that could make a
difference to your business and
reach out to them. Be nice. It'll
come back around.”
tweet this!

50.
Question
“Do you think as an industry we're any further along?
Where do you think the search industry is headed now
in 2015? How can we do better?”
Dan Shure
“SEO/Marketing. Husband. Musician.
Hip hop lover. Cat servent.”

51.
Answer:
“Well I still think there's room to do more interesting things
than just SEO - if you look at what companies like SEER,
Distilled, Built visible Etc. are doing there's some really
exceptional content, PR and marketing coming out of them
and that's what I think the industry should aspire to.”

53.
Answer:
“I think you should cry into your whisky at night like every
other SEO since the advent of not provided. I still recall
Matt Cutts being all ‘it's only ever going to be a tiny
percentage!!’ HAHAHAHOHGODOHGOD.”

54.
Ann Smarty
Brand Manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas
Words of Wisdom
“I am sure there are lots of
theories and strategies behind
community building but I am
guided by only one "Give, give,
give, and don't even expect
anything back"
tweet this!

55.
Question
“How vital is content's role in SEO?”
Julia McCoy
CEO of @ExpWriters, http://www.expresswriters.com . Dedicated to rising
above mediocre in a sea of content. Wife and mom to a baby cherub.

56.
Answer:
“Content is the foundation. You can't do any SEO, PR, etc
without having content. That's where you start.”

57.
Question
“What do you believe the pros and cons are of hosting a
SaaS company's help/support articles on their website vs.
hosting them on a site like Zendesk? We use Zendesk now
(The help center is currently receiving about 4 times the
traffic per month as our company website).”
Johnny Page
Entrepreneur and Marketer focused on Growth. Sharing
about business, fitness, and real life. @sharesilvertrac

58.
Answer:
“I like having all my content on my site (whenever I can).
That's why I don't even use Disqus for comments... so I am
biased here... If I were you, I'd definitely move the content.
If I were you, I'd definitely move the content.”

59.
Question
“What do you consider the number one mistake being
made by content marketers while trying to optimize
their website for SEO?”
Ross Morrone
Director of Marketing @youngstownstate &
Prof @brandeisu in Strategic Analytics.

61.
Question
“I have a couple of websites [where] everything was done completely
wrong, the SEO, duplicate content, directories, article marketing, etc.. I
like to get your opinion on how best to start over. I believe one has a
panda penalty, the other a penguin penalty. I was thinking of combining
the two sites into one big site, new name, new url. Of course, doing
everything right this time, no keyword stuffing, rewriting manufactures
descriptions, etc. What do you think of this approach?”
Byron Tabor
Camping, Hunting and Emergency Preparedness

62.
Answer:
“I think we are almost done with the era of multiple niche sites
each targeting a separate long-tail phrase. We are more about
consolidating effort around one AWESOME website. The other
question is what to do with all those half-penalized niche sites.
Do you just forget about them? Do you try to somehow leverage
that past effort? It may depend on how crappy those niche sites
are but in many cases, I'd just drop them and start over.”

64.
Answer:
“My first reaction was quite passive. I was at the
conference and didn't have time to think too much about
that. I was wondering what the consequences to the
members might be - this was my biggest worry…”

65.
Question
“What's the most powerful link building technique you
suggest to ensure that I get sureshot search engine
rankings?”
Dr.Spencer Jones
Journeying towards my goal to help people build an online business
that produces sustainable monthly income, working from home...

66.
Answer:
“It's building your authority building. Many people in my industry
know who I am. Some of them link to my articles, some cite
what I had to say. Others are happy to publish my article or
interview. Because I am a public figure, bloggers often invite me
to expert roundups or podcast interview. There's so much
opportunity when you are known in certain circles. That's why I
always recommend investing in yourself!”

67.
Question
“My question is regarding duplicate content. When repurposing content,
one might, for example, turn a blog post into a slideshare presentation.
Considering that both post and presentation have the same title (and
perhaps the same description), can Google view them as duplicate
content? Would you recommend, in this case, changing a bit the title and
description of the repurposed piece?”
Carlos Jader Filho
Digital Marketer with a background in Sociology, book author,
music addict, tambourine player-to-be. @Deliartbr's Editor.

68.
Answer:
“Carlos, definitely use a different title and description. One
of the beautiful things about re-packaging is the ability to
rank for different variations of search queries. I use to find
different ways to phrase a similar concept.”

69.
Question
“Was the creation of MyBlogU directly caused by Google's actions
toward MyBlogGuest? Was this your way of re-wording
MyBlogGuest's main idea and thus "rubbing it in" to Google's
reasoning?”
Karol K
The guy running http://newinternetorder.com/ blogger and
writer for hire at http://karol.cc/ professional yerba mate drinker

70.
Answer:
“I knew guest blogging was getting old and what happened was going to happen. So we were planning a re-
brand and add new functionality. My team member @DonSturgill found this domain and registered it for me
while I was working with my dev team on the functionality. We were planning to phase out "Articles Gallery"
and push new functionality (Interviews, Brainstorms, etc) within the same community.
It was taking us longer than projected because of the war in Ukraine (and all my developers are there), so we
didn't manage to re-brand by the New Year of 2014 as we had projected. It's hard to say whether it's for
better or for worse... Google may have penalized the re-branded site as easily... So hard to tell…
The penalty only influenced us in one way: We were not able to redirect the old site and we decided to keep
it. So now we have two sites instead of one :) But MyBlogU was coming by all means... That's why we were
able to launch it so fast after the penalty: It had been planned for 6 months earlier :)
MyBlogU has absolutely different functionality, so the two actually work well together... So probably
everything was for the better!”

71.
Question
“What's your most favourite SEO tool and why?”
Dr.Spencer Jones
Journeying towards my goal to help people build an online business
that produces sustainable monthly income, working from home...

72.
Answer:
“I don't have ONE because there are lots of SEO-related tasks and I have a
favorite one for each of them...
Just a few of them:
● Crawler to quickly diagnose the most obvious on-page issues: www.
internetmarketingninjas.com/seo-tools/google-sitemap-generator/
● Majestic to quickly check backlinks: majesticseo.com
● SpyFu to quickly check rankings: www.spyfu.com/”

74.
Answer:
“MyBlogU is being built as if Google doesn't exist... I don't
even know which keywords could match the project. I
officially don't target any Google's rankings. I am happy it
ranks for its own name at least for now :)”

77.
Answer:
“Although pretty complicated at times, I have enjoyed
eCommerce audits - especially large or complicated sites. I
usually tear my hair out in the process, but it has always
felt good to finish one of those.”

81.
Answer:
“I don't think there is quite an "ultimate metric" but one I've
talked about a little before is branded search volume. You
can learn SO much by knowing that people are going to
Google and typing in your brand name.”

82.
Question
“An SEO asks you to play a song (on the piano, unless
you're also adept at the ukulele) at a bar where a
bunch of other SEO's are hanging out. What do you
play?”
Victor Pan
“Mysterious search marketer quoted on Reuters, Mashable, and ITWorld.
Outlier TCK, ABC and Millennial. I know just enough to be dangerous.
Father.”

83.
Answer:
“This would be some sort of hip-hop cover/improvisation
like these and I'd hope @ipullrank might be there to do
some rapping over it :)”

84.
Question
“You're an entrepreneur and you know a little something about
leadership. You're also a New Englander. Super bowl 2015. Last
play by the Seahawks. How would you go about tackling a
decision like that with implications that large?”
Sam Mallikarjunan
“Weirdo at @HubSpot Labs. Author: How To Sell Better Than Amazon. I'm here to
smoke cigars, drink scotch & kick ass. Pray I don't run out of cigars & scotch.”

85.
Answer:
“I think it's incredibly important how you prepare yourself for those
moments way before they ever happen. In other words - that coach
needed years of experience leading up to that in order to make that
call. Same with business and SEO. It's kind of like Gladwell's Blink. You
spend SO much time on your skill - those snap decision have to
become second nature.... and you have to trust yourself and your
instincts that when those times come, you've prepared yourself and
know you'll make the best call you can.”

86.
Mackenzie Fogelson
Founder & CEO of Mack Web. Blogger for Moz
Words of Wisdom
“If you're just getting started in the
industry, make sure that you learn
everything you can about, well,
everything.”
tweet this!

87.
Question
“Inbound marketing" and "SEO" cover such a wide
range of skills today. What would you say are the most
effective skills to focus on when you're just getting
started in the industry?”
Emily Grossman
Francophile, foodie, salsa dancer, occasional writer for Goutaste. Mobile Marketing
Specialist @MobileMoxie. Formerly @doubleencore (now @possiblemobile).

88.
Answer:
“If you're just getting started in the industry, make sure that you learn everything you
can about, well, everything.
Understand why SEO is important (I'd recommend reading the Moz Beginner's Guide to
SEO: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo, reading Paddy Moogan's Link Building
Book: http://www.linkbuildingbook.com/, and enrolling in DistilledU: http://www.distilled.
net/u/). Then read everything you can about social and content and email marketing and
PR and....you get the point.
I'd also recommend reading Marty Weintraub's book: http://www.amazon.
com/Complete-Social-Media-Community-Managers/dp/1118466853.”

89.
Question
“What is the best way to communicate SEO reporting to clients? Is
the devil in the details or should talk strictly traffic and sales? I've
had big wig clients roll their eyes when i get into the nitty gritty
and SME's wanting to know every detail, should you alternate
depending on client or would you suggest a more structured
approach?”
Martin Harris
Marketing Executive at Tank

90.
Answer:
“That's a question I'd recommend asking each of your clients. We very much customize
our reporting to what the client needs in order to understand the value we're providing
and how we've been making a difference in their business.
We operate on the unless I hear differently concept so I'd recommend that you iterate
with a report that you feel is valuable and then ask for feedback. Ask them if the metrics
that you are providing are helping them to better understand their business and the
efforts that you're making to change it for the better.
Be careful with reporting being something that you're just checking off the list. Anything
you spend your time on has to provide value. If it's not, do something different.”

91.
Question
"Where do you think SEO is heading? What is the
future of SEO?”
Hyderali Shaikh
Digital Marketing Specialist at Concept Digital

92.
Answer:
“Seems like it's an integrated world of experiences.
Google has been heading there for some time, and I really
do feel that digital and inbound marketing is getting there
as well.
That's more of a Will Critchlow question :).”

93.
Paul May
Co-founder of BuzzStream
Words of Wisdom
“If I had it to do over again, I'd focus
almost all of my early efforts on social
engagement and incorporating early
customers into the development of the
product...provide amazing customer
service.”
tweet this!

94.
Question
“What is one SEO or marketing tool that you just
cannot live without at BuzzStream?”
Scott Wyden Kivowitz
Photographer at http://scottwyden.com , blogger, author & educator. Community
& Blog Wrangler at http://www.photocrati.com & http://nextgen-gallery.com

95.
Answer:
“Liam's bookmarklets for scraping lists. http://www.onlinesales.
co.uk/. Specifically the pageLinks bookmarklet that scrapes the
inbound links on a page...great for "best <topic> blog pages and
other list resource pages. I use this to pull the URLs, then I
import into BuzzStream and then qualify based on the metrics,
contact info and an in-context inspection of the site.”

96.
Question
“What would you say is the best way to promote
content? If you could share your top 3 methods, that'd
be great!”
Spook SEO
Niche Blog Networks on Fiverr

97.
Answer:
“Too often, people spend a ton of time thinking through their content strategy and then
just haphazardly throw together an outreach list and start emailing. This is a wasted
opportunity and pretty much guarantees that you won't get as much out of your work as
you could have.
You'll get a lot more out of your efforts if your system is rooted in five principals:
1. Spend at least as much time on planning as you do on the actual promotion
2. Broaden the list of people you reach out to by segmenting your "content market"
3. Leverage easier to acquire links to help get the more difficult ones
4. Engage in your community prior to outreach
5. Automate low value tasks (finding contact info, collecting metrics, etc)”

98.
Question
“You've worked with a lot of SEO agencies and in house
teams, both big and small. What are some of the problems
that you see that are pervasive in the industry, regardless of
company's size or budget? From an outsider's perspective,
what is plaguing the industry?”
John-Henry Scherck
The ARR is not my son, but I will raise it.
Search, SaaS and growth marketing.

99.
Answer:
“I'd boil it down to what I'd describe as "transactional thinking." This leads to
bad messaging, low retainers, misaligned KPIs, ineffective organization
structure, etc. As google has gotten smarter, it's pushing things in favor of
people who are thinking in terms of real customers and real marketing. One
example...people still think about link building as a one-off transaction. This
still works in many cases, but it's not a long-term position and it under-values
the agency's work. I think that a huge percentage of the things that SEOs are
great. There's a chunk though that I think they should just forget (the
transactional thinking). ”

100.
Peep Laja
Founder of ConversionXL
Words of Wisdom
“Attention is a very scarce
resource and a key principle for
a high-converting UI is to
conserve attention at all costs!”
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101.
Question
“What books do you recommend for a beginner to start
reading to do SEO?”
Rob Kutch
Reboot your perspective on life, nutrition, health and medication.

102.
Answer:
“I haven't been doing SEO myself for a few years and
hence I'm unsure what's the latest and best SEO book out
there. You'd be probably better off reading stuff online as
books might have outdated content.
There's a free course by SEOMoz people here. https:
//www.udemy.com/whiteboard-seo/.”

104.
Answer:
“In 2005 (8 years ago, jeez!) I was the marketing manager of a real
estate portal in Dubai. In order to drive more business, I started to
learn SEO and PPC. In 2007 I founded my own SEO company. It was
then where I learned that my customers were interested in money
more than traffic.
So I started to tweak their sites here and there, learning stuff as I went
along. I read a bunch, took courses, built stuff for clients - and got
results! And I've been on a learn-build-measure-learn cycle since.”

105.
Paul Shapiro
Organic Search Director at Catalyst
Words of Wisdom
“In SEO in particular, the use of
machine learning algorithms is
going to influence how we make
optimization decisions.”
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106.
Anuj Adhiya
Co-founder (& also tweet as) @PlanitWide.
Also Director of Engagement & Analytics @GrowthHackers
Question
“When it comes to travel - the prized first page of Google search results
appear to be heavily SEOd. For most queries, you're going to see the
usual suspects like TripAdvisor, Expedia, LonelyPlanet etc show up in the
organic results.
Is there any way that someone without the kind of resources these guys
have to even have a shot of showing up on the first page? What's the
best case scenario here?”

107.
Answer
“You're playing against some serious powerhouses as I'm sure you're aware.
I'd go in attack them a scalpel. I'd collect a ton of data on TripAdvisor in the
SERPS and try and find as many holes, places they aren't ranking as possible--
then build content off of that as a seed. (I may consider crawling their entire
site to look for gaps and doing some data mining with that information). You
can start to build pages for more competitive area once you have some pre-
existing visibility where these guys don't. I'd also play off of other marketing
channels like Social, places where these guys aren't hitting as hard. Maybe
create highly specific, targeted BuzzFeed style content that you can get a
certain group of people to share. You need your foot in the door!”

108.
Question
“Do you have any predictions for how big data is going
to be influencing SEO in the future?”
Camille Taylor
“Customer Success, SaaS, Marketing, Infosec + Bitcoin.
INFJ. Currently making sure you love @adespresso.”

109.
Answer:
“In SEO in particular, the use of machine learning
algorithms is going to influence how we make optimization
decisions. I think the ability to "learn" and "predict" how the
search engines might react to changes is HUGE. The
complexity of the search engines makes this an ideal way
to approach the data.”

110.
Question
“What are some important SEO truths that you know
are true that most SEO people will not agree with you
on?”
Parag Patel
“Co-Founder of @invoicedapp.”

111.
Answer:
“I have encountered a lot of disagreement about the importance of
keywords... I was studying how Upworthy was doing on the SEO front
and I noticed that just from their social distribution they were acquiring
links and easily ranking for very thin content--often ranking for
keywords that weren't even mentioned on the page or in anchor text.
It was a combination quality backlinks and semantic understanding of
links and other (albeit very-few) keywords on page.”

112.
Question
“I'm creating a new website to replace my old one.
What are the things I should do to make sure I don't
lose my SEO juice?”
Robert De Los Santos
“Proud Husband & Entrepreneur at Sky High Party Rentals, Firestartup, &
Indiehouston. I love working on community projects. Music, Art, Film @YEC
member.”

113.
Answer:
“Site migration: Just set-up all of your 301 redirects if the URLs are
changing at all. Every page should be mapped to a new one.
PageSpeed: I think a B (80+) is perfectly acceptable. I think my site is a
79 and I'm okay with that at the moment (I need to work on it). Of
course, you should strive for an A. I think the PageSpeed number
generalizes a bit using heuristics and doesn't alway reflect actual page
speed.”

114.
A little bonus from
Anthony Thomas and Joe Chernov
GM and Co-founder of Sticker Mule VP of Marketing for InsightSquared

115.
Question
“Do you do organic search/SEO growth projects? If so,
what has worked well and how does it compare to
retargeting ads and PPC? Are retargeting ads
important to you guys?”
Joe Robison
Proprietor at Green Flag Digital. Director of Marketing at Bucket List Events.
Current affair: SEO + Marketing Automation. Chrome tab power opener.

116.
Answer:
“SEO / Retargeting, we hired an SEO firm when we launched and they fought
with us to add meaningless content to our site. Since then we’ve mostly
ignored SEO and focused on UX and customer happiness. I still get critiques
from SEO guys about things we could be doing better. We think Google’s
ultimate goal is to identify the best companies and rank them well so we focus
on becoming great at what we do and trust Google’s algorithms have a way to
figure that out. Retargeting ads are high ROI but represent an insignificant
amount of revenue. In other words, they’re worth doing but don’t make or
break our business.”

117.
Question
“If you were starting from scratch on a new SEO
agency today, what would be your most important lead
gen tactic and why?”
Matt Antonino
Senior digital marketing manager helping businesses
grow through SEO, SEM & omnichannel marketing.

118.
Answer:
“Crowded market with a couple of dominant blogs and a
couple of dominant personalities. Tough space. This isn't
going to sound very top-of-funnel-ish, but I'd create an
incredible customer success story and promote the hell
out of it. I'd start at the bottom of the funnel in your case.”